Timothy McVeigh was executed on June 11 of 2001. Around the time of his execution, the Chicago Tribune ran a breakdown of all 168 people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. Here are some examples of how the victims were mentioned:
Donald Earl Burns Sr., 63, taught woodworking for many years.
John Van Ess, 67, played national championship basketball as a student at Oklahoma A&M.
Karen Gist Carr, 32, was a member of Toastmasters International.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any of those details. However, as I read and reread every little bio on the list, I found myself deflated by the realization that virtually everyone’s life is only remembered for one thing. J. D. Salinger wrote Catcher in the Rye; for all practical purposes, that’s it. He may as well have done nothing else, ever. As time passes, that book becomes his singular legacy. He’s certainly famous, but 98 percent of the world doesn’t know about anything else he’s ever done. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin; every other element of his existence is totally irrelevant. Bill Buckner let a ground ball go through his legs in the World Series and cost the Red Sox a championship; in fifty years, everything else about his career will be a footnote.
This doesn’t just apply to second-rate celebrities, either. It’s equally true for normal citizens (case in point: Oklahoma City bombing victim Oleta Christine Biddy was undoubtedly a complex human, but the readers of the Chicago Tribune only know that she “always had a smile on her face”). Beyond your closest friends, you can probably describe everyone you know with one sentence.
I think this is what motivates people to have children. Everyone agrees that creating life is important, so having a child guarantees you’ve done at least one act of consequence. Moreover, it extends the window for greatness; if your kid becomes president, your biography becomes “the parent of a president.” The import of your existence can be validated by whoever you bring into the world. But this doesn’t always work. In fact, sometimes it makes things worse. Which is why the most depressing thing about the Oklahoma City bombing is that there’s now an innocent woman whose one-sentence newspaper bio will forever be, “She was Timothy McVeigh’s mother.”